YYayoi Kusama (born 1929, Matsumoto, Japan) is a pioneering artist known for her polka dots, pumpkins and immersive “Infinity Mirror” rooms. As a child she experienced vivid hallucinations of dots and nets, which became the basis of a lifelong visual language. She moved to New York in 1958 and quickly became part of the avant-garde, showing large “Infinity Net” paintings, soft sculptures and public “happenings” that sat alongside Pop, Minimalism and performance art.
Kusama returned to Japan in the 1970s and has since lived voluntarily in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, working daily in a nearby studio. Her practice spans painting, sculpture, installation, writing and performance, and often explores repetition, self-obliteration and the thin line between fear and fascination. She represented Japan at the Venice Biennale in 1993 and has since had major retrospectives worldwide. Today, her mirrored rooms draw huge audiences, while her pumpkins and dots appear in both museum settings and large-scale public works. Despite their playful surface, her works are rigorous studies of perception, time and the desire to disappear into pattern.
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